DAMIEN HIRST | Untitled

Private Collection, Europe (a gift from the artist)
Christie's, London, 12 February 2009, Lot 108
Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colour in the catlaogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the background is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a very small and faint media accretion to the third spot up from the bottom hand right corner, which fluoresces lightly. Inspection under ultra violet light reveals some uneven fluorescence in the bottom right hand corner which looks to be original.
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Addictive, exhilarating and tantalisingly evasive, Untitled is one of Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings: one of the most globally significant series in the entirety of Hirst’s oeuvre. First appearing in paintings directly on the exhibition walls of Freeze (1988), the series has grown over time, filling canvases of all shape sand sizes and exploring almost any colour combination possible. Every member of the Spot Paintings shares a certain set of properties: the shapes involved on any work are all and only spots or spots cut by the vertical edge of the canvas, these spots are arranged on a grid made invisible by a white or off-white background, no two spots on a given work touch each other, and no hue is ever repeated on the same work. Untitled is no exception. The sheer scale of the uniformity – this industry of spots – is part of the present work’s power. The institution of the series verges on performance art. The conception and distribution of the Spot Paintings is deliberately reminiscent of the pharmaceutical industry: an idea is drawn up by an individual entity before being variously marketed and liberally distributed around the world. This relation to modern medicine runs deep into Hirst’s oeuvre. The Spot Paintings were executed in parallel to the Medicine Cabinets series, begun in 1988, with works containing the packaging of Hirst’s late grandmother’s medicine displayed in wall-mounted cabinets. And a prolific sub-series of the Spot Paintings is the Pharmaceuticals; ostensibly indistinguishable from the others, except with explicitly medical or chemical titles, such as Acetic Anhydride (1991).

There is certainly a palpable irony – an intentional, self-deriding poetry – to the Spot Paintings, but what is less certain is how to articulate it. In a deft, subtle intimation, they seem to fetishize the systems of late capitalism and postmodernism in which they are so highly evaluated. The spots themselves, of course, are like small pills or the packaging of same: attractive – putatively redemptive, even – but never in fact without side-effects. In a way that is just as deliberate and precise as the contours of the spots, Hirst makes the series imply a kind of morbid celebration of heavily mediated and medicated postmodern experience: there is some combination of spots – the paintings seem to say – for everybody’s distinctive chemistry; some combination of spots that reconciles them to the world producing the very paintings containing them. The spots of Untitled at once appear delicious and sweet-like, and simultaneously exude a reflexive and knowing aura that comments on the society that produced them.